Waving bye-bye to Calcutta

Or Kolkata, depending on which name you want to give it.

We didn’t do a lot yesterday, mainly just swapping hotels and walking about. The food is good here – a couple of great cafes round the corner – and we got chatting to a nice bunch of people from Oz and Ireland before encoutering the largest gaggle of Americans I’ve seen in one place since I visited Texas. They were all in India to work for a non-profit organisation helping people to fund themselves. Good stuff.

In the evening, we channel-surfed for about four hours seeing as we had a telly. Eventually, we settled on Headbanger’s Ball n VH-1 which whiled away some time as we remenisced over some good old early 90’s heavy metal.

Today we wandered around the museum, which wasn’t too bad for 150Rp (plus 50Rp camera fee we didn’t pay). It’s got an enormous collection of fossils, bones, rocks and the like and really seems more of an impressive reference place than a browsing one.

Afterwards we headed on the underground for the Kali Temple (Kali Ghat) a few kilometres away. The morning ceremony involves the ritual sacrifice of a goat and we missed that. Funnily enough, I’m relieved… Although many people were still praying in the area where it takes place and blood was still very much evident.

We didn’t bother going into the temple as the queue was really rather long and we were getting peckish by then. Not for mutton, though.

Lunch was back where we’d had dinner the night before. I settled on a pizza as we’re travelling by train tonight and I guarantee dinner will be chicken fried rice!

Next stop is Varanasi. We should arrive sometime early tomorrow morning, hopefully refreshed after a comfy train ride. Back in the real world, however…

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